Jump to navigation Jump to search This article is about the alcoholic beverage. Whisky or whiskey is a type of distilled alcoholic beverage made from fermented grain mash. Whisky is a strictly regulated spirit worldwide with many classes and types. The typical unifying whiskey mixed drinks of the different classes and types are the fermentation of grains, distillation, and aging in wooden barrels.

This Gaelic word shares its ultimate origins with Germanic water and Slavic voda of the same meaning. Much is made of the word’s two spellings: whisky and whiskey. There are two schools of thought on the issue. The spelling whiskey is common in Ireland and the United States, while whisky is used in all other whisky-producing countries.

In the US, the usage has not always been consistent. The earliest certain chemical distillations were by Greeks in Alexandria in the 1st century AD, but these were not distillations of alcohol. The medieval Arabs adopted the distillation technique of the Alexandrian Greeks, and written records in Arabic begin in the 9th century, but again these were not distillations of alcohol. The earliest records of the distillation of alcohol are in Italy in the 13th century, where alcohol was distilled from wine. The art of distillation spread to Ireland and Scotland no later than the 15th century, as did the common European practice of distilling “aqua vitae”, spirit alcohol, primarily for medicinal purposes. Scotch whisky, and in 1506 the town of Dundee purchased a large amount of whisky from the Guild of Barber-Surgeons, which held the monopoly on production at the time.

Renaissance-era whisky was also very potent and not diluted. Over time whisky evolved into a much smoother drink. With a royal licence to distil Irish whiskey from 1608, the Old Bushmills Distillery in Northern Ireland is the oldest licensed whiskey distillery in the world. In 1707, the Acts of Union merged England and Scotland, and thereafter taxes on it rose dramatically. Following parliament’s divisive malt tax of 1725, most of Scotland’s distillation was either shut down or forced underground. George Washington operated a large distillery at Mount Vernon.